Every minute, your contact center generates massive amounts of data, as information flows between your customers and your organization. The contact center serves as a tool to manage this data and use it to provide customer service.

By managing the enormous amount of data, the contact center can provide insights into your customer journey to optimize your services. These insights empower agents to provide more effective and efficient service to customers. The challenge in leveraging this significant data source is in its volume. How can you sift through all of the information to find the key insights and draw accurate conclusions about your customer experience? That’s where AI comes in.

Your agents already have access to a wealth of customer information through CRM integration. This helps them provide effective, personalized service, and to solve problems quickly. Customer-specific information is important, but many insights can be gained by looking at the overall contact center. This holistic view is made possible with AI. Integrating AI into your contact center allows you to take massive data sets and distill them down into specific insights, in real time. This allows agents to receive recommendations to improve customer service while they are assisting customers. Combining customer-specific information with general insights creates a powerful experience.

Nearly every contact center uses more than one channel to provide services to customers.

Many modern contact centers even deliver services through three or more channels. If you aren’t delivering services on the channels that your customers use the most, you are missing opportunities to connect with them on a daily basis. The contact center provides organizations with the ability to unify customer experience across channels, but how can you ensure that your agents are also providing a unified experience?

Omnichannel agents

Enabling your agents to use all contact center channels is the key to unifying customer experience. Providing your agents with the ability to use all contact channels ensures that customers receive the same experience regardless of what channel they are using. Many customers use multiple channels to interact with organizations, so having the ability to obtain the same information and the same level of service across channels is crucial.

Omnichannel efficiency

Enabling agents for all contact channels means a significant increase in efficiency. Having agents handling multiple contact types means that no agent sits idle when the volume for a specific channel is low. If the contact center is not receiving many emails, this means that the agent can still handle voice calls while volumes are low. This means less idle time for agents, shorter wait times for customers, and a unification of contact channels.

Getting up to speed

Many contact centers have agents that handle specific contact channels, but are not trained to handle other types. For example, a voice agent may not be trained for social media interactions, or an IM agent may not be trained to handle voice calls. This training barrier can present a major issue in contact centers that handle a number of contact types.

ice Contact Center helps organizations overcome this. ice handles voice calls, emails and IMs in the same format they are received in. However, all other contact types take advantage of these three channels for agent handling purposes. For example, social media messages are handled by agents as IMs, as are SMS messages. Social media posts are handled by agents as emails. Any contact type in ice is handled as voice, IM or email. This provides a unique opportunity to organizations, as they can train omnichannel agents, simply by training them on three contact types.

Using Post-interaction surveys is an effective way to measure customer satisfaction and gather agent performance metrics. However, it is often difficult to get people to agree to participate and also difficult to get them to complete the whole survey, so it's important that you make it as easy as possible.

Many solutions come with a survey module. Regardless of the solution you've chosen, you need to keep these tips in mind to ensure your survey is effective. This is a 2-part blog: we'll be sharing 5 tips in part one and 6 in part two.

Using Post-interaction surveys is an effective way to measure customer satisfaction and gather agent performance metrics. However, it is often difficult to get people to agree to participate and also difficult to get them to complete the whole survey, so it's important that you make it as easy as possible.

Many solutions come with a survey module. Regardless of the solution you've chosen, you need to keep these tips in mind to ensure your survey is effective. This is a 2-part blog: we'll be sharing 5 tips in part one and 6 in part two.

These days, companies use outsourcing to gain a cultural and competitive edge. This can also be viewed as an opportunity to re-invent a brand or product that requires a fresh start. The other benefit with outsourcing new partner is that the relationship is moulded carefully, fully catering to the needs of the business and without the history/baggage of existing departments and processes that may not have worked in the past.

However, outsourcing a contact center is different than any other forms of outsourcing. In the past, contact centers had a negative reputation for being ‘cost’ centers. Outsourcing decisions were largely based on cost savings and therefore with limited budget did not generate the business sought after. Today we see a lot of change from that. Contact centers now are very savvy in the way they handle their side of the business. They now have become essential to winning over customers, increasing sales and given the multitude of tech-savvy consumers out there, magnifying a company’s brand online.

When looking to outsource contact center, keep these four points in mind:

Hiring can be a very daunting task. Especially if your criteria for the contact center agent is not clearly defined. Not everyone is suited for this job. It takes candidates that are naturally inclined to assist, that takes the time to explain and is solution-oriented. Top performing service agents carry these traits:

Friendly

Customer Service focused

Considerate

Efficient

Results-oriented

Accurate

Any intelligent person can learn the technical skills of the job but it’s the true aspiration to help customers that is much more difficult to relay. Therefore seek out candidates that already possess this ability to have successful hires.

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We are firm believers in Lync Unified Communications and the benefits it brings to the business communication world. We are excited to share some of the things we’ve learned about Lync development, custom Lync applications, and Lync issue resolutions.

The Blog Team consists of employees from different departments, so you will get different perspectives on various topics that are relevant in the Telecommunications industry.

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